CARE AND FEEDING OF THE YOKELS:

'Idiot's Veto' not worth the cost (ROGER SIMON, 7/16/08, Politico)

This week, the New Yorker magazine published a cover depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as dangerous radicals. In the cover illustration, they are standing in the Oval Office giving each other a fist bump. He is wearing a turban and she is wearing an Afro and has an AK-47 slung over her shoulder. They are burning an American flag in the fireplace and a picture of Osama bin Laden is hanging on the wall.

The New Yorker was kidding. It was satirizing those people who hold stupid misconceptions about the Obamas.

Fly-over country gets it (Democracy in America, 7/16/08, Economist.com)

WHILE the New Yorker's Obama cover should have run its course as a news story by now, I will apologetically continue its relevance just long enough to note that Timothy Egan hits the nail on the head in a New York Times op-ed today as to what we can take away from this tempest in a teapot. Namely, that all the ruckus came from high-minded blue-staters who were deathly afraid that those nit-wits living in places where people still drive pick-up trucks would be too thick-necked and thick-headed to get the joke. But it turns out voters can actually think analytically without shopping at Whole Foods. Mr Egan investigates in Missoula, Montana, a town known for fly-fishing and taciturn manly-men and not too far from that red-state where Dick Cheney hunts and fishes. He concludes that "they get it as well. Irony, it turns out, does cross the Hudson River."

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 16, 2008 6:02 PM